Honor Killing Film Shortlisted for Oscar

The new film “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness” has been nominated for best Documentary Short at this year’s Academy Awards. It documents the incredible story of Saba Qaiser who was shot in the head by her own father, and left for dead in a river in Pakistan.

Honour killing is the killing of a relative, especially a girl or woman, who is perceived to have brought dishonor on the family. It is a practice that is normative within certain cultural/religious groups, predominantly Islam, where traditional sharia law calls for the stoning of adulterers (a punishment carried out in modern day Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others).

Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba, and their son Hamed, Afghan family came to Canada in 2007, murdered 3 daughters and first wife in June 2009

Muslim Women’s rights advocates are often demonized by regressive liberals and the media for talking openly about the reality of honour violence.

In one shameful example, Sheema Khan was featured in the Globe and Mail where she slandered the producers of the feature documentary “Honor Diaries” calling them “anti-Muslim zealots” (response by Raheel Raza). In using this type of language, Ms. Khan is knowingly invoking two serious and hateful coded messages:

Calling Muslim women in the film such as Raheel Raza “anti-Muslim” is code for “apostate”: a crime punishable by death according to the extreme Islamism that Ms. Khan professes

Calling those involved in the film “zealots” is code for being part of the “Zionist conspiracy” that Ms. Khan and other Islamists tout

Both of these accusations are provocations to justify violence being used against them. The Globe and Mail is either extremely ignorant or complicit.

No doubt there will be similar condemnations of A Girl in the River by Islamist hypocrites and apologist regressive liberals.